We have to perform some database maintenance for the next 15 minutes or so. The site will remain up, but your page loads may be slower during the process, or you may receive timeouts. We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this may cause and promise to have full functionality restored as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience during this process!
If you were on JamLegend between 4am to 5am PST today, you may have noticed intermittent blips as we pushed changes to the site. In case you were wondering what we were up to, here is the answer to your curiosity.
Showdowns - Hosting, Browsing, and Less Breaking
Last week I posted a picture of Showdown testing in progress, here's what we were testing.... For anybody who has desired to host your own showdown, your time has come. You can now create, name, and assign a password to protect your showdown from unwanted competitors; the password part is optional. Additionally, to help you find these hosted showdowns, you can now browse all the open showdowns. Along with these two feature introductions, we also squashed a lot of bugs, so they should behave better on the whole.
Tappable / Hammer-on / Hopo Notes
We're very, very careful about changing the feel of the gameplay unnecessarily. That's why, over the last week, we thought very carefully about modifying our algorithms for determining tappable notes. In the end, we decided the changes were well worth any adjustment because of the increase in consistency they would provide. In short, we modified a few things and introduced some heuristic algorithms to provide a more consistent experience. If anybody is interested in the details, leave a comment and I'd be happy to go into it more.
Sent from my iPhone
The team at R & G Lounge in Chinatown, SF after enjoying a great dinner.
We've received a few complaints over the past few months about having to hit the note before a hammer-on / tappable / hopo note earlier than usually necessary. We looked into this and realized the feedback was well founded, specifically with runs of descending hammer-on notes (ascending runs were fine, for the most part, but not always). Notes that you had to strum before a hammer-on, or series of hammer-ons, had to be strummed earlier than necessary because of a bug in how we evaluated chords and tappable notes. I am extremely happy to say that, as of 3 minutes ago, we pushed a fix to the live site. Rock on!
Many of our users feel like Stanley from the Office when they encounter what has been called the "stuttering problem."
The stuttering problem can occur in three ways when you're playing the game:- the display is not smooth (low frame rate!),
- the display suddenly freezes for a brief bit while music continues and then the display catches up.
Some of our users have called this "lag", but this problem isn't caused by your network speed. We cannot always solve #1 because it is caused by old computers.
But, the culprit for #2 is... the browser (your Internet explorer, firefox, safari, etc.). If your browser has been open for a long time (hours, or even days), it will use up a lot more resources. Also, if you have a bunch of other windows open (especially with ajax intensive applications like Gmail, Meebo, or most online e-mail and chat clients), then stuttering is more likely to occur.Don't despair though, dear Stanley. Simply restart your browser. Don't just close the windows-- QUIT the whole browser (and all of those applications). Firefox, for example, a known memory hog, is nearly guaranteed to cause "lag" if it's been open for a few days.In the rare case it is network issue (for all of you still on dial-up), just wait for the song to load completely before playing. The song progress bar on the lower left of the fretboard will show you how much of the song has loaded. It might be worth at least a test or two of letting the song completely load just to see if that changes anything. Hope this helps a those folks experiencing this problem.We had some unfortunate downtime for a few hours today when one of our servers freaked out. We're working on identifying the cause and preventing this from happening again. Things are back up and running smoothly now!
Check out our new standalone version on Kongregate: http://www.kongregate.com/games/JamLegend/jamlegend
User frankisno asked how to invite friends to play a Showdown- JamLegend's multiplayer, so I thought it would be nice to give a quick little tutorial. We know that many users enjoy playing Showdowns and are excited to invite their friends to play with them, so we want to make it as easy as possible.
It's easy to get started (see the nice slideshow of photos showing how to invite others to play):
- Enter the Showdown and you should be placed in the Waiting Area for the songs to start.
- Once you're there, on the bottom right of the screen is a where you can copy/paste a link to e-mail, IM, or any other way to contact your friends.
- Even if the Showdown has started, you can also send the link to friends who want to join in.
Sorry everyone! Turns out showdowns were down for a good part of the afternoon. We eventually figured out the root of the problem was an issue with our AWS server, however Amazon didn't let us know until about 10 hours after we started having problems.... grrr...
Interestingly, we noticed that our average time on site metric went down quite a bit during this time. Clearly showdowns are a popular feature and we will continue to improve them.
Feel free to comment with any suggestions on how you would like us to improve showdowns.